Saul and Patsy

by Charles Baxter

  “Hey, Gordy,” Saul said. “I have a great idea. Let’s go for a ride. What d’you say? Let’s go for a ride in my car.”

  “Where?”

  “Oh, who cares. Let’s just go for a ride.”

  “Know what this is?” Gordy reached in under the back of his trousers and pulled out a small shiny handgun, a revolver of some sort, one of the common ones, maybe a .22-caliber. He held it in his palm for Saul’s inspection. He grinned. Saul backed up two steps. He felt prickles on his skin and a sudden animal heat. He wanted to shout aloud at Patsy, to hide herself and Mary Esther. But silence for now might be better, less crisis-making.

  “Well, it looks a lot like a gun,” Saul said quietly. Behind him, Mary Esther’s crying had ceased as suddenly as if a conductor had cued it to stop. Calm. Be calm. Saul thought that Patsy must be nursing the baby in the rocking chair upstairs, and he was counting the number of steps to the house and calculating how long it would take him to get there: about twenty-four running strides, approximately fifty seconds, much more time than the little metal duck in the shooting gallery had in its perilous journey from the right-hand side to the left. Saul imagined himself with a target painted on his chest, the same as the duck’s. The rest of Saul’s mind had gone haphazardly bare. He would protect his wife and child. But for now, he would not move. His entire life job was to stop this young man from creating harm. “What kind is it? Is it loaded?”

  “That’s right,” Gordy said, suddenly serious. Then he gave himself a little squirrel-shake. “That’s right, it’s a gun. But, no, it ain’t loaded.” He raised it up to the sky and pulled the trigger again and again and again and again and again. After he lowered his arm, he looked directly at Saul. “You wouldn’t like me if I came here with a loaded gun. But, hey. You can shoot the sky all you want, Mr. Bernstein. I just thought I’d show it to you. I thought you’d be interested. You want it? Want to shoot the sky?” His eyebrows went up. “You can pretend to aim at the sun—you know, shoot it out?” He smiled his discolored toothy smile. “Then the earth would go dark.”

  “No. Not now. Whose is it?” Saul asked. Somehow, as a survival trick, he felt he should keep Gordy talking. But the question seemed to flummox the boy. So Saul tried another question. “Why did you think I wanted to see it?”

  “’Cause everybody wants to see a gun,” Gordy intoned with certainty. “Nobody don’t want to see a gun. A thing can’t get more important than a gun.”

  “I agree with you there,” Saul said. Monitoring himself, he noticed how expert he was, how exemplary, at pretending to be calm, when in fact all he really felt was a certain variety of domesticated and internalized cancerous emotional riot. Patsy. Mary Esther. “Hey, Gordy, let’s go for a ride in the car, okay?”

  “Okay, I guess. Don’t you need shoes?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Saul said. “I can drive barefoot. I’ve done it before.”

  “You sure have a lot of hair on your arms,” Gordy said. “Hairiest man I ever saw. Is that Jew hair?”

  “Sure is. Gordy, how about if we get into the car now, right this minute?”

  “I was just askin’,” Gordy said, as patient as a turtle. “Okay, let’s do that.”

  Gordy pocketed the gun, picked up the rusty bicycle at his feet, and sauntered toward the car. He loaded the bike into the backseat, where it dripped rust over the upholstery. After Saul got in and twisted the key, challenging the car to start, they drove out onto Whitefeather Road. Down the road, three-quarters of a mile away, the old town dump was being filled in. They were going to put a housing development there. Where would the rats go? It was a problem. You couldn’t shoot them all. Even the rats needed somewhere to stay.

  Within another mile of the landfill, the farmland quickly morphed into cement and asphalt parking lots outside the Wolverine Outlet Mall and the Happy Village CinePlex 25 and the Bruckner Buick-Honda MotorMart, dominated by the grinning giant white plasticene Bruckner polar bear, an attention-getting device two stories high with its pawful of green plastic cash, an offering to passing motorists, and, floating above the bear but still tethered to it, the Bruckner MotorMart blimp—really just an outsized helium balloon—unmoving in the infernal morning heat. On clear days, the blimp, floating above the trees, was visible from Saul and Patsy’s bedroom window, although both Saul and Patsy tried to avoid looking at it. Now, behind the wheel, with Gordy next to him viewing the sights, the gun pocketed somewhere, Saul felt richly overloaded with anger and bad nerves, but at least he had Gordy in the car, far enough away from the house and from Patsy and Mary Esther so that the kid could do them no harm. He switched on the air conditioner, then remembered that the compressor wasn’t working. The Chevy was a lemon, but Saul was too fatalistic to do anything about its various debilities; and, besides, he identified with the car and its failings. Any car he owned would eventually fall to pieces, simply because he owned it.

  It was so hot the sky was almost more white than blue. The sun had some real anger behind it today, a distinctive solar rage.

  After opening the window, he saw up ahead a group of middle school girls standing out on the side of the road, waving their arms toward a side drive and holding up signs that said FREE CARWASH! He knew those girls: it was a money-making scheme for the ninth grade, the pretty ones, the Eloi, standing out on the road to attract attention, while the homely ones, the Morlocks, washed the cars and begged for gratuities. It all felt posthumous to him, this morning spectacle, as if Gordy had loaded the pistol and shot him and Saul was driving toward the afterlife, which would be about fifteen miles out of town in a strip mall bordering a dairy farm.

  “Look at them,” Gordy said. “Dumb girls. They just spit on the cars they wash.”

  At least the gun wasn’t loaded. Two of the girls watched him drive past, with Gordy on the passenger side. They waved with feigned cheerfulness until they saw Gordy, when their expressions were downgraded to surprise and alarm.

  Thinking of the gun, Saul considered the prospects following his death. His chances weren’t good. There would be no harps in the afterlife, but instead long moralistic debriefing sessions in classrooms, during which he would have to explain himself and his quirks at length to some querulous Christian saint wearing sandals and a business suit and holding a clipboard. It would be like a substance-abuse clinic, with slogans and checklists and chores and trivial corrections, and a big sign over the main gate: WE WON, YOU LOST. There would be no unconditional forgiveness. Everything would be on a contingency basis. God’s anger would have to be placated with sacrificial offerings, starting with Saul’s irony, which Saul would have to throw away on the eternal spiritual fire, along with his skepticism and his interest in baseball and his Charlie Parker LPs. It would all have to go. The population of souls in Saul’s afterlife would have smiles on their faces, evangelical tent-show grins. Angels would be displaying their navel-less midriffs and grooming their wings with giant pearl combs. They would be dabbing their feet in the river of light. Saul didn’t want to die because the possibility of his having to join the God cult, following the expiration of his body, unnerved him. Perhaps they’d toss him in Limbo, a place full of cubicles and malfunctioning coffeemakers intended to break everyone of the caffeine habit, and of every other habit, for that matter. He would have to take lessons in sanctity and sincerity. There would be odious piety. There would be sensitivity training. They’d start calling him “Paul” instead of “Saul” and he wouldn’t be able to stand it. In Limbo, though, he’d have plenty of company: almost all of the Jews would be there, analyzing the situation. And, then, Patsy would appear on the scene, eventually. She would know how to handle whatever came up.

  Unless Heaven happened to be run by Arabs. Perhaps Allah was actually in charge. If so, Saul’s goose was cooked.

  “Hey,” Gordy said. “You’re driving to my house. Can I turn on the radio?”

  “The FM doesn’t work. Only the AM.”

  “Hey,” Gordy said, “this is a real shitty
car.” He squirmed in his seat. “Looks ain’t everything. How come you never fix any of it?”

  “How come you knocked down my beehives?”

  “How come when I ask you a question, you ask me a question?”

  “Who wants to know?” Saul asked. Gordy slouched down and put his hand over his face. They drove on in silence.

  Saul had motored past Gordy Himmelman’s house on Strewwelpeter Street many times before, so he knew where it was, in a low-rent neighborhood of dying and spindly oak trees behind the parking lot of the new WaldChem processing plant, where as their new sideline they made genetically engineered dehydrated fruit, and when he got to where Gordy lived, some woman was outside smoking a cigarette and hammering at the broken wooden steps leading up to the front door. She wasn’t Gordy’s mother—it was Brenda Bagley, Gordy’s aunt, the waitress who worked in the Fleetwood. She was wearing a faded cotton housedress and sneakers, and when she stood up, she looked like an undersea creature.

  Her face was disfigured by years of hard work and stupendous ugliness: her hair hung around her pockmarked cheeks like seaweed around a clam. Her hooded eyes were fatigued and suspicious and sullen; nothing done by human beings could surprise or please her. Behind where she was standing, the house, a white prefab with corrugated steel sides—the kind of house sought out by tornadoes—rested somewhat precariously on concrete blocks, a huge spiderweb satellite TV dish planted next to it on the lawn.

  Brenda Bagley watched as Gordy pulled his bicycle out of the back of Saul’s car. Gordy wheeled the bike across the street, and Saul started to wave just before he saw Gordy’s aunt, whose voice was muffled, lift her left hand, the one with the cigarette, across her forehead. After another exchange—Saul couldn’t hear what they were saying—she reversed her grip on the hammer and hit Gordy twice in the face, hard, with the hammer’s wooden handle. She did it so fast, Saul could hardly see her hand moving. She did it like a virtuoso, practiced and instinctual. She did it with considerable force. She hauled back and brought her hand down in a familiar swift arc.

  Gordy cried out. Then he fell to his knees and put his hands to his head at the scalp just above the ear. The woman reached back again with the hammer and then seemed to think better of striking the boy a third time. She leaned down, withdrew the gun from Gordy’s back pocket, and lumbered into the house with it. When she came out again, Gordy was making his way up to his feet, and the woman began to shout at him, and Gordy shouted back. They did it casually, as if they were used to the dailiness of violent quarreling.

  Saul steered the Chevy over to the shoulder of the road, killed the engine, and hurriedly got out. He jogged across the street and approached the woman, who had by now returned to her work. Gordy was bleeding, a small rivulet of blood trickling down from a bruise near his left ear across his cheek, and he was wiping it with his dirty hand. More blood came oozing out from his scalp, soaking his hair. Then his cursing stopped. As Saul neared them, both the woman and Gordy stared at him, the woman still hammering as she stared, though Gordy had retreated backward toward the house, against which he leaned, holding the side of his bleeding head. Saul had no idea what he himself would say. He hadn’t been invited to this particular gathering. But there was always something to say if you could only think of it.

  “Hello,” Saul said.

  “You’re the teacher,” the woman said. From inside the home came the sound of a TV set singing and selling. Straightening up, she reached into the pocket of her dress, pulled out an unfiltered cigarette, and lit it. “The reading teacher. I remember you. We met. I sure heard enough about you from him. He says you don’t like him.”

  “Saul Bernstein,” he said. “Yes, that’s right. I’m Gordy’s teacher. You and I have had a conference about him.” He paused, thinking about his role in all this. “Ms. Bagley, I was always available for more conferences if you wanted to talk to me. Anyway, he bicycled over to my house this morning, and so I just brought him back.”

  “Oh, uh-huh,” the woman said. “Well, like I say, I’ve heard about you lately. Gordy’s been talking about you, now and then.” Saul waited for secondhand praise, but it did not come.

  “I couldn’t help but notice. What did you hit him for just now?” Saul asked, nodding in Gordy’s direction. He felt it was best not to ask her how, as the boy’s aunt, she figured she had hitting rights over Gordy. He didn’t know how to do this sort of interview. He didn’t know how to talk to her.

  “He needed hitting,” Brenda Bagley said, relying, like one of Tolstoy’s peasants, on simplicity and truth. “He can be a bad boy when he gets an idea into his head. Straw that broke the camel’s back and all that, with me being the camel, y’know.” She smiled briefly at Saul, not a camel but a lobster smile, all teeth and skull. It was horrifying. “I mean, do you think he should be carrying a gun around?”

  “I would never hit a child,” Saul told her.

  “Oh, you wouldn’t? That’s interesting. What I heard was, you shook him so hard last week, his head just about come off, and his teeth out of his head. He had a headache afterwards.”

  “Gordy was on my property. He had knocked my beehives over,” Saul said, in explanation, and his forehead broke out in a sweat. “He’d been prowling and trespassing.” It sounded lame to him even as he said the words. His inadequacy in argumentation startled him.

  “Could have been the storm did it. We had terrible winds around here, flung things all over the yard, as you can see.” Saul didn’t dare take his eyes off her. She had some sort of birthmark on her neck, a discoloration in the shape of a tiny football, and the smoke from her cigarette, when she exhaled, surrounded her head like an insulating aura. It was as if her head was smoldering, a peat bog of a head. She tossed the cigarette off into the bushes. “He came over to your house this morning again? Well, he was supposed to stay here,” she said.

  “That’s why you hit him?”

  “Nope. I hit him because he took my gun with him, stole it out of the house, and headed up on his bicycle to where you live. And even if it wasn’t loaded, which it wasn’t, it scared the death out of me just now that he had done that, that he would think of doing that. He’s got a thick skull, Gordy has. You have to hit him pretty hard to make a single thing register on him.”

  “All he wanted to do was show me the gun. That’s really all it was,” Saul said, not certain that it was the whole truth, or that he should bother to excuse this inexcusable boy. “Well,” Saul said, “I guess I had better be going.”

  “That’s a good idea.” She nodded. “I like your explanation for it, that he wanted to show you that gun. Well, you can think what you like. I certainly won’t stop you. I’d invite you in for coffee, but you’re not wearing shoes,” the woman said, pointing at Saul’s bare feet. She scowled at his appearance.

  “Should we talk again about this? We need to talk about Gordy’s future.”

  “That’s a good one,” the woman said, starting to laugh. She reached into her mouth and picked a shred of tobacco off her tongue. “His future.” She laughed with feeling. “Well, I got work to do here, so if you’ll excuse me,” she said, and leaned down to finish the job she had started.

  When Saul got back to the house, his barber-friend, Harold, was sitting in the kitchen with Patsy, the two of them drinking coffee, Mary Esther fussing in Patsy’s arms. Harold had come over to steal Saul away to play basketball for an hour; he was dressed in his T-shirt, shorts, and expensive name-brand athletic shoes. Mad Dog and Karla would join them— Karla was a better player than Mad Dog anyway. It was a Saturday-morning ritual. Harold stared at Saul. “What happened to you?” he asked. “You look all messed up.”

  Patsy stared at him, too. Saul realized that he must be a sight. “Honey, where’d you go?” she asked, as she lightly bounced Mary Esther twice. “You were out here in the kitchen, and then you were gone, and you didn’t leave a note or anything. I was a little worried.” Her hair filigreed back from her forehead. There was a tiny stain on her
blouse from her lactation. Her beauty tore through him like an electric shock, and he felt himself stirring. For a moment, he didn’t even want Harold looking at her. At that moment, she handed the baby to Harold.

  Recovering himself, Saul explained about Gordy, about the gun, and the hammer handle to the head. “Funny that she broke the skin,” Harold observed. “Usually you just get a lump raised with a hammer handle.” Both Patsy and Saul examined Harold in the moment that followed, and Harold shrugged. When Saul mentioned Gordy Himmelman’s gun, Patsy inhaled so suddenly that the baby started to wail. Harold passed the baby back to Saul.

  “We have to report this to somebody,” she said.

  “Report what? To whom? And for what? Possessing a concealed weapon? Trespassing? You can hit your kid all you want in this country. It’s fully legal,” Saul said, bouncing Mary Esther until she quieted. “People do it just to get their excess energy out. Anyway, it wasn’t loaded, and this whole state is sympathetic to concealed weapons.”

  “Oh, you don’t want to get mixed up with Brenda Bagley, anyway, that whole crew,” Harold said, scratching himself and standing up to provide a certain inflection to his sentences. As he stood and stretched, he said, “That woman you saw is Gordy’s aunt, as you know. Gordy was the son of common-law Mrs. Himmelman number one, that woman’s sister, that woman you talked to being Brenda, and as for the man of the house, he’s been gone for a couple of years. I knew him—now there was a piece of work. Rufus, his name was, and dumb as a box of rocks, but he did always have girlfriends, and he liked to hurt people. She—Brenda—got custody of the boy, I don’t know, a year ago, at least, long after Rufus disappeared into the depths of Wyoming. It’s complicated. It’s always complicated with people like that.”

  “What happened to her? To Gordy’s mother?” Patsy asked.